How did Cattell’s work alter the nature of American psychology? How did he promote psychology to the public?
Allegedly Cattell turned interested in the field of psychology as a consequence of his own tests with drugs. He experienced different substances-tobacco, chocolate, opium, morphine, caffeine and hashish- and observed the results to be of professional as well as personal interest.
Few drugs- especially hashish, comforted him appreciably and decreased his depression. He documented in a journal how the drugs had affected his normal working and functioning of cognition.
Cattell made a choice to perform experiments on the time of reaction- the time needed for various activities of mind- and the observations of his experiments strengthened his aspiration for becoming a psychologist.
Cattell adored wideness of interests of Galton and his focus on statistics and measurements. Under the influence of Galton, Cattell turned into first psychologist from America to stress ratings, ranking and quantification.
He was personally an illiterate in mathematics and usually made errors in subtraction and addition. Cattell established the extensively used method of ranking by order-of-merit and was one of the first one to teach the statistics of results found from experiments.
Along with statistics, Cattell had interest in work by Galton in eugenics. He contended for the delinquents’ sterilization and alleged persons with defects and for providing incentives to intelligent, healthy people if they will intermarry. He made a promise to his children a reward of $1000, if they will marry daughters and sons of professors from college.